The Virtual Movable Human Upper Body for Palpatory Diagnostic Training

This paper presents our virtual model for the dynamic human upper body, including the spine, shoulders, and arms skeletal structure. We enable realistic human motion with anatomically-accurate joint motion limits and a 71 degrees-of-freedom branching serial chain model. Our interest is to provide realistic motions when the student doctor moves the virtual patient for palpatory diagnosis training. To date, this work include only skeletal motion with skin stretched on the model, but in the future we will augment our static Virtual Haptic Back model with this motion. In this way, student doctors can feel changes in human tissue due to motions, a common diagnostic technique.